President Donald Trump and his allies are already feeling the heat for having banned major news outlets from the White House, MS NOW’s Jen Psaki said on Tuesday evening’s edition of “The Briefing” — and are concocting lies to try to justify it.
The ban has resulted in Trump not getting coverage during his events, and is already subject to a blockbuster lawsuit from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico that experts consider likely to succeed.
“So far, this whole thing has not been going especially well for Donald Trump and his administration,” said Psaki, herself a former White House press secretary. “For one, Trump officials are struggling to come up with an even remotely logical explanation for why the president is blocking press access just 42 days before the election, perhaps because there isn’t one.”
In response to the uproar, Psaki noted, “the White House is circulating a set of very, very defensive talking points to try and, I guess, retroactively justify the president’s latest completely rash decision. And unsurprisingly, none of their justifications hold water whatsoever.”
To start with, she said, “They essentially claim that Democratic administrations did the same thing, suggesting that the Obama administration intentionally barred Fox News from participating in a round of interviews during his administration. Now, I happened to be part of the Obama communications team at the time, and I lived through this. So let me just take the liberty of debunking this particular myth.”
What really happened, explained Psaki, is that “back in 2009, the Treasury Department did not include Fox News on a list of outlets that would be interviewing one of their officials on one particular day,” and the reason was simply that Fox News didn’t request an interview. “But when Fox News complained that they had been left off the list and the other networks backed them up, the Obama White House immediately granted Fox News an interview.”
“Now, is that a reflection of everyone in the Obama White House loving Fox News, wanting to sing kumbaya together and loving all their coverage?” she asked. “Of course not. That’s not the point. I mean, that is the point, actually.”
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